Second Glance (11 page)

In none of these letters did he mention his XP condition. In none of these letters did he seem any less than an average, athletic, normal American boy from a happy two-parent family.

In short, Ethan had turned himself into everything he was not.

With a sigh Shelby left Ethan’s room and started down the hall. Passing Ross’s door, she hesitated. She was eight years older than Ross; it seemed she had been taking care of him all her life—from diapering him as an infant to sitting by his side after his suicide attempt to worrying for his safety when he did not call her for months. Mothering had always come easily to her; when their parents had died years ago, she simply stepped into their shoes and took over.

She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel girder the Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it all could be snatched away.

Which brought her right back to wondering when Ross would bring Ethan home.

She pushed open the door and began to clean in there, too. She made Ross’s bed. She lined up his toothbrush and his hairbrush on the dresser. She put his shampoo, nail clippers, and toothpaste into his toiletry kit and zipped it shut.

The chair was piled high with her brother’s rumpled clothes. With a sigh she lifted one soft shirt and creased it neatly, set it on the edge of the bed. She balled together a pair of socks. She stacked boxers and tees and finally shook out a spare pair of jeans. As she began to fold them with military precision, something fell from the pocket. Shelby leaned down to pick up what had dropped: three pennies, dated 1932, which she set on the dresser where Ross would be sure to see them.

Ross turned and waved up at Ethan in the window, then cautiously approached the spot in the woods where he’d last seen the flash of white. He had left Ethan with the Maglite, which meant Ross fully expected to plunge headfirst over an exposed root. Although he couldn’t see more than a foot in front of him, he could still hear the sounds of someone—or some
thing
—scrabbling around.

Ross shivered; it was colder out here than he’d expected it to be, and he wished he’d brought his sweatshirt. He could suddenly smell wild roses, as if there were a field of them underfoot, and he knew from Curtis that this, too, was a way a ghost might make its presence known.
Show yourself
, he thought.

But any hopes he had of encountering his first apparition died as he came upon a young woman, crouching as she tried to dig into the frozen earth.

She was wearing a flowered dress, and her pale hair was wild around her face. The white flash Ross had seen was a lace collar. She was feverishly busy, intent on her task. And she was as real as the ground beneath his feet.

Clearly, she had not heard him approach, or she would have realized she’d been caught in the act of . . . well, whatever she’d been doing. Ross found himself tongue-tied—not only wasn’t she the ghost he’d been hoping for, but she was young, and pretty, and uninvited. He seized on that, if only to have something to say. “What are you doing here?”

She turned slowly, blinking, as if surprised to find herself in the middle of the forest. “I . . . I don’t know.” Glancing down at her hands, dirt caught beneath the nails, she frowned.

“Did van Vleet send you?”

“I don’t know Van Fleet . . .”

“Vleet.” Ross frowned. Maybe it was only an unlikely coincidence that the night he began his investigation, an insomniac would come wandering onto the property. There
were
other homes in the vicinity, and stranger things had happened. He found himself wishing that he hadn’t started this conversation on the defensive. He found himself wishing she’d glance up at him again. “What are you looking for?” he asked, nodding toward the hole she’d been digging.

The woman blushed, which lit her from the inside. When she shook her head, he could smell that floral perfume again. “I have no idea. The last time I sleepwalked, I wound up in a neighbor’s hayloft.”

“With or without the neighbor?” Ross heard himself ask, and the woman looked so mortified that he immediately wished he could call back the words. He dug his hands into his pockets instead, trying to make amends. “I’m Ross Wakeman,” he said.

She looked up, still discomfited. “I have to go.”

“No, see, where I come from, the appropriate response is: Hello, I’m Susan. Or: Hey, Hannah’s the name. Or: Howdy, I’m Madonna.”

“Madonna?”

Ross grinned. “Whatever.”

A tiny smile played at the corners of her mouth. “I’m Lia,” she said.

“Just Lia?”

She hesitated. “Beaumont. Lia Beaumont.”

Every line of her body was poised for flight. Then again, coming across a stranger in the middle of the woods when you were sleepwalking was bound to be upsetting. If possible, she seemed even more unsure of herself around Ross than Ross felt around her. She nodded, still awkward, and started to walk off. Ross was filled with an unaccountable need to keep her from leaving, and tried to think of one thing to say that would keep her here, but all the words dammed up at the base of his throat.

Suddenly, she turned back to him. “Were
you
sleepwalking?” “No, actually, I’m working.” Ross wound the thread of conversation tight around himself, an anchor.

“Here?
Now
?”

“Yeah. I’m a paranormal investigator.” He could tell the term didn’t ring a bell for her. “Ghosts,” he explained. “I look for ghosts. In fact, I came out here because I thought your collar was . . . well, anyway. You’re not quite what I was expecting.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

She tipped her head to one side, studying him. “You really believe people can come back after they die? Like Harry Houdini?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” She wore sorrow like a hangman’s hood; it shrouded her delicate features. “Who knows?” he teased. “We may even have company right now.”

But his words made Lia glance behind her wildly. “If he finds me . . .”

Who
? Ross wanted to say, as he realized that this woman’s skittishness was not about being discovered by him, but being discovered by someone else. Before he could ask, an earsplitting scream curled from the house. “Uncle Ross!” Ethan shrieked. “Uncle Ross, come
back!
”

Ross looked up at the window, where there was no longer any residual light from either the flashlight or the video camera. The blood drained from his face as he imagined what Ethan might have seen. “I have to go,” he said to Lia, and without any further explanation, took off at a dead run.

From the
New York Times
:

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE
NIGHT?

by Kerrigan Klieg

Comtosook, VT—The residents of Comtosook, a small town in the northwest corner of Vermont, are eager to tell tall tales. There are stories of maple sap running in the dry summer months, of flower petals falling from rain clouds and of ground freezing solid in the middle of August, of cars that suddenly can only move in reverse. Yet the strangest part of this gossip is that it happens to be true, and these odd occurrences are just the tip of the iceberg. Experts at the nearby University of Vermont in various fields have not been able to explain the numerous events, but residents have their own ideas about what’s causing the commotion: a spirit, a restless one who doesn’t want to be moved.

Weeks ago, Comtosook was a bucolic Vermont town. Then the Redhook Development Group struck a deal with an elderly landowner to acquire a small tract of property. Immediately, a local band of Abenaki Indians began to protest, insisting the land was a native burial ground. Archaeological testing done by the state has not revealed any human remains, although that is incidental, says Az Thompson, a local Abenaki leader: “I wouldn’t expect some flat-lander real-estate group to know where my ancestors are buried, but I sure didn’t expect them to tell me I’m lying about that, either. Who gave them the privilege to rewrite my history?” Adds Winks Smiling Fox, a fellow protester, “Enough has happened here lately to prove that as much as Redhook wants
in
, there’s something else that doesn’t want
out
.”

He refers to the growing list of oddities that have begun to wear down the general public, even those who live miles away from the disputed property. Abe Huppinworth, proprietor of a local general store, has become used to sweeping rose petals off the porch. “They fall all night long, like snow. Three, four inches deep when I come in to open up. And there isn’t a rosebush within three miles of here.” Ava Morgan took her two-year-old son to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington when he awakened one morning speaking Portuguese, a language with which none of his family was familiar, much less fluent. “The doctors couldn’t tell me what happened, either. They tested him forward and backward, and then one morning it all just went away, and Cole was back to saying
Mommy
and
milk
.” Not all residents are as complacent, however. Over six hundred signatures filled a petition that was given to Rod van Vleet, project manager on site for the Redhook Group. Mr. van Vleet declined to be interviewed, but has previously dismissed all claims of paranormal activity on the property as preposterous.

Reports allude that van Vleet may not be as confident as he asserts. Sources say that the Redhook Group has commissioned an investigator to explore the property.

To the townspeople, however, both the hidden intents of a real-estate developer, and the angry fury of the Abenaki, are equally unimportant. “All I know is, this is wearing me out,” says Huppinworth, at a pause in his endless sweeping of petals. “Sooner or later, something’s got to give.”

It was an established fact of the universe that Meredith was never going to meet a decent man. At work, she was too smart, and therefore too intimidating. Blind dates didn’t prove any more successful. The last one she’d been on was with an actor her grandmother had met in the park, who’d arrived at the restaurant dressed as Hamlet
. To leave or not to leave
, Meredith had thought,
that was the question
. Since that debacle, her grandmother had presented her with the phone numbers of a mortician, a vet, and a chiropractor, but Meredith had conveniently lost each one. “I want a grandchild before I die,” Ruby said, on schedule, every two to three months.

“You have one,” Meredith would remind her.

“One with a father,” Ruby would clarify.

Meredith had finally caved in, when Ruby told her that
this one
spent his free time doing volunteer work with senior citizens. So now, Meredith was sitting across from Michael DesJardins, trying to convince herself that this wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed.

He was drooling. All right, so it had to do with dental surgery he’d had that day, but it wasn’t particularly appetizing for Meredith. “So,” he slurred, “you work in a lab? What do you do . . . feed all the mice and stuff?”

“I do PGD. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis.”

“I’m in the catering business.”

“Oh?” Meredith folded her hands in front of her, watching him butter an entire slice of bread and stuff it in his mouth. On the bright side, it did mop up his excess saliva. “Are you a chef?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

She’d always harbored the fantasy of a man whisking her to a cozy apartment, where a fabulous gourmet meal had been prepared for her enjoyment. “I guess being in a restaurant feels like work, then.”

“This is a cut above my place, actually . . . you ever go into the Wendy’s on Sixteenth Street?”

Meredith was saved from responding when the waiter approached with their entrées. Michael began to cut his entire steak into little quarter-inch cubes. It made her think of the meals they served in mental institutions.

She smoothed down her napkin and looked down at her chipolata sausage, nestled on a bed of polenta.
The silver lining
, she told herself,
is that I’m going to get a good meal out of this.

Michael pointed to her dinner with his knife and laughed. “Looks like a Great Dane did his business there.” A line of drool dribbled down his chin.